Scarlett Sinclair learned to code the same year she learned to lie. Both required discipline, precision, and an unerring sense for the pressure points in a system—whether that system was a database or a boardroom full of men twice her age. By twenty-five, she could reduce a room to silence with a single, surgically sharp sentence. Her words wrapped around egos like a leash, yanking until someone whimpered. But here, in the suffocating hush beneath a foreign canopy, her mastery felt as distant as childhood. The trees crowded close, the air syrupy-thick and alive, clinging to her skin until she could no longer tell where her body ended, and the wild began. The Emerald City Pack's stronghold crowned a rise just beyond the city's last, desperate reach of light. Scarlett paused at the threshold, studying the trees. They braced in rows, trunks the color of old bone, roots interlaced in a way that suggested a snare more than a welcome. She'd never believed in magic—only in the cold math of consent, in the transactional give-and-take of desire. Yet as she stepped across that forbidden line, something inside her flexed, a shudder of pure sensation that lashed up her spine. Need and dread, old enemies, collided within her, and for the first time, she wondered if the stories about wolves and fate were just metaphors for appetites like hers.